


You Sleep in a Palace

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 100-1000 Words, 100-500 words, Character Study, Dreams, F/M, Ficlet, Gen, Introspection, POV Second Person, Present Tense, Sentence Meme, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 15:57:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where Daniel goes in his dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Sleep in a Palace

**Author's Note:**

> First sentence by 6beforelunch.

You sleep in a palace.

It's not a palace of memory, like the ones Matteo Ricci and George Johnson knocked around in, except that it does contain all the memories you never got back, and they're there if you want them, and none of them hurt.

It's not a palace of wishes, because even in your dreams you've abandoned any hope that dreams come true, and it's not a palace of the damned, for you alone are damned to wake upon the russet-clad morn; only you enter here, only you rove the palace's battlements of night, only you ever depart.

It's a little bit like the palace of the Light, and a little bit like the castle stronghold of Heliopolis, and a little bit like Shyla's palace, but its euphoria is more glorious and it holds infinitely more knowledge and it's not addictive at all. It's a palace filled with all the homes you ever had and could never stay in, populated by all the people who never died, going about the work they never got to do, meeting all the other people they would have loved. It's a palace of reunions and achievements, a palace of Never Never-Enough-Time, a Never-Say-Never-Land. It's a quantum palace and every chamber is a Schrödinger's box and there's nary a dead cat to be found; every door you walk through collapses the wave function into one of an infinity of happinesses. It's an Escher palace with none of Möbius in it; on the front door, which no one ever knocks on, is a sign handpainted in a little boy's scrawl that says NO STUPID SENSELESS TRAGEDY ALLOWED. EVER.

Although you know the sign is there, and you know who made it and you know it works, you never see it; you usually slip in through the back or one of the side doors, unobtrusively, in the hour or so before dawn, and in the way of dreams in that hour you live a happy lifetime; and then you slip into the room down the hall from your parents' room, and slide into bed beside your softly dreaming wife, and drift into a contented drowse listening to the sounds wafting up and in through the happiness-permeable floor and walls -- Reese's excited chatter, Robert's nasal voice presenting his latest paper, Janet's musical laughter. You float softly through your dreams within the dream, and however hard or cruelly you wake, the palace is still around you, diaphanous and shining -- barely sensed except for the knowledge that it's as real as the world you've chosen to return to, and that someday you'll make a different choice, and then you'll wake in a palace, too.


End file.
